Monday, December 7, 2015

C3PO - Slave or Tool?

Someone on Facebook was bemoaning the robotic slavery
inherent in the Star Wars movies recently, which got me thinking: is C3PO a
tool or a slave?

When I watched Star Wars in late 1977, I wasn’t aware of the
term ‘Artificial Intelligence’. Although ‘robot’ comes from the Czech word for
‘forced labour’, the robots of the popular culture of my youth (like ‘Robot’ in
Lost in Space and Twiki in Buck Rogers) were clearly mechanical tools, not
self-aware entities that felt their inherent freedom of choice was being
unfairly constrained.

And the same seemed to go for the robots in Star Wars. It
looked like they enjoyed their work, it's true. C3PO in particular loved
facilitating human/cyborg relations and R2 was never happier than when rooting
around inside an X-Wing under fire. It may have been because they took
'sentient' pleasure in their work, but it's just as likely it was because they
were made that way.

And similarly, both of them displayed individual
personalities, but that's not proof either. It may simply have been the way
robots were programmed in that galaxy, to make them more accessible to their
human users.

Both C3PO and R2D2 were able to operate apparently
autonomously - although in the case of R2D2, it was under secret orders to
deliver a holo-message to a certain Jedi Knight. But that doesn't mean they
were slaves. And it can't even be argued that the robots in Star Wars were used
as a 'metaphor' for slavery, because 'human' slaves were clearly depicted in
the movies: Annakin and his mother were slaves and so too – briefly – was
Princess Leia.

C3PO and R2D2 also did their bit in battles, bashing unwary
stormtroopers, but all that demonstrates is that this galaxy far, far away
never heard of Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics. A robot may harm a human, it
seems. Certainly our two mechanical heroes are mistreated. They’re stolen by
Jawas, reconditioned, reprogrammed and resold. But this doesn’t feel like
slavery either. It’s more like some automotive chop shop.

I’m willing to be convinced otherwise, but it seems to me
C3PO isn't a person, he's just a bit of a tool.

This article originally appeared in the 'Planet Geek' section
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SF quotes

"the Culture had placed its bets—long before the Idiran war had been envisaged—on the machine rather than the human brain. This was because the Culture saw itself as being a self-consciously rational society; and machines, even sentient ones, were more capable of achieving this desired state as well as more efficient at using it once they had. That was good enough for the Culture."— Iain M. Banks